A year and 2 months past the dexterous breaking of the padlock (or rather, it still stayed locked, hanging idly alongside the broken hasp from the same ring in a door jamb in the lazy mouse’s house), the electricity came to the Yezznaggomer Village over the iron poles installed and aluminum wires stretched over by the employees of the state company ArtsakhEnergo.

Lots of pastimes came within reach, I brought my PC from Stepanakert and the weekly wet cleaning of the house was being done to the sounds of the Golden Collection of Rock and Roll, and buying lavash bread from the Lachin City was obliterated altogether.

Instead, I was buying there 25-kg sacks of flour and mastered baking bread in an electric oven.

A semi-automatic washing machine was also bought, and the so necessary drill-grinder-and-welding-machine arrived in the workshop shed.

And when KT employees came to the village offering access to the Internet, I was the first to sign the contract for the minimum speed connection because of its cheapness, since construction costs absorbed the lion's share of my budget...

Letters began to come to my email box from girls who lived in various countries, yet were similarly very rich, potentially, none of them worth less than 10 million dollars.

Each girl had her own sad story why she was unable to take those millions from her bank account without my passport and the attributes of my bank account, where she would transfers them to, the money, so that we could split it conveniently.

Unfortunately, I never had a bank account and, most reluctant to lose communication with the girls, I began spinning yarn about my being a convict for life (absolutely wrongly, because of an accidental judicial error). However, I somehow managed to hack the Wi-Fi password of the Prison Director and our electronic correspondence brightens up my wretched misfortune... But the heartless bitches did not buy my sentimental stories and in a like manner dropped sending their letters to my prison cell...

Then Emma alerted me on the social network Facebook *

(*the organization is presently recognized as a terrorist one and banned on the territory of the Russian Federation)

as a popular means of communication.

I signed up, but never bothered anyone with the request to be my FB friend, because of being too shy and bashful. Well, yes, except for the request to Emma to see what button is for what there, you know.

Still and yet, by the time when FB blocked my account forever, I had 350 friends and 45 followers.

Not surprisingly though! Every day I posted 2 pictures from Yezznaggomer and parallel worlds....

My frictions with FB were triggered off by the pandemia.

For me as a person, who thru all their life lived in a police state (except for my stretch in the Yezznaggomer Village), it would be certainly a shame not to see that I, as a resident of this here planet, was being driven into a global concentration camp prodded by the fictitious pandemia and other tools for brainwashing.

I did not conceal my indignation, and FB inescapably erased my calls for vigilance as a stuff obnoxiously violating the community rules.

Then they (who?) over there (where?) apparently got tired of my perseverance and I was kicked out because allegedly (they were the allegators) someone had staged suspicious activities about my account from the city of Belgorod (Russia) and now, for security reasons, I should insert a picture of my passport into their alert message and press the button.

I inserted it in and I felt pleased with so solicitous a care about my security, however, the feeling did not last long for they (who?) in a minute informed me that it was not me and my passport in the picture was not mine either.

Hey, you (who?)! Over there (where?)! Are you (who?) barking mad?!.

But how and to whom can I prove a shred of anything, if It does not care to disclose Its address?

The verdicts issued from who knows where reach you in the one-way manner, anonymously, on behalf of all the community. Do you have the nerve to kick against billions of users, huh?

So, my account stayed blocked, and now I don’t even know what happened to it.

It's a pity, of course, 5 years of rural life, people, animals, plants, clouds, flowers, stones… 2 pictures a day.

I counted on FB as an additional storage space. Alas, everything went to the hell, because soon the hard drive with the photos melted.

My bad! I should have stored the pics on Google Disk or made a backup laser disk copy!

But I have no complaints about Zuckenberg and I don’t call him a “f@cking b1tch” in the manner of certain irresponsible FB users.

The life experience prompts me that the Mister is nothing but another of showcase dolls like, say... (no! no! no! I haven’t uttered anything of the sort!. it’s not me! and it’s not about Him! not at all! God give Him health without bounds and now, and forever, and for all His further presidential terms...)

When you don't have a musical ear, you can't really count on the careers of Bach, Van Cliburn or Tatiana Bulanova. More so if you don’t have a voice either, and your feel of rhythm fails, at times.

But if you do want it? So really badly?

Then you download and install Muscore, audacity and other software of your choice, and you buy a plastic microphone for Skype or Zoom, and you set up a YouTube account named Studio Village.

Haha! Long live the Internet! Hooray YouTu.. what the fuck?! One of the numbers produced by painful efforts of all the Studio staff does not download…

Not a big deal for a seasoned Internet user here, you just contact the support service and, after 2-3-4 email exchanges, you figure out the sequence of buttons to be pushed to get to where you should type in some shit or another. Smart boy! You have built up one more muscle in understanding software materiel!

But on YouTube, such numbers simply do not work, to won the right of contacting the support service, please prove having 1000 subscribers to your channel.

Who do they think I am? Damn Bach? Or fucking Tatiana Bulanova?

Okay (quoting the locomotive over Anna Karenina), take it easy...

However, when that same YouTube wiped out one of the Studio's artifacts because by that my anti-war number I violated the rules of the YouTube Community, it wafted a pretty familiar stink.

HEYAA!. WELCOME! FIND YOUR PASTIME AT THE GLOBCAMP!

(Persons of different orientations, are requested to use applicable entry gates by pressing appropriate buttons:

[Twitter]: (tweet your chirp!),

[LinkedIn]: (your career in a button click!),

[Instagram ]: (You! Are! So! Beautiful! To you!!),

[Tik-Tok]: (fik-fuck-fec & pookie-lookie!),

see more…)

Nothing doing, I made a U-turn from the U-tube gate and posted the anti-war copy on https://vimeo.com/727663083, while that platform had not yet been bought out by Google for the global edification of shepherded communities.

(For those too acutely quick-witted, it should be disclosed that:

yes, the first 4 lines in the opus were stolen from the film “Two Comrades At Their Hitch” (1968); and

no, the number was deployed on Vimeo March 17, 2019, 3 years earlier the Special Operation of Russia against Ukraine.)

Another social network, discovered later on, called themselves LitProm, A Dutiful Guard of Spirituality on the Internet.

Well, I registered to see their standpoint on spirituality and who they defend it from: from bestiality more and more raising its head? or they man prison towers with the machine guns turned to cover the inside perimeter?.

Bro! It’s crystal clear there, the Union of Writers of the USSR in a fresh foil wrap, smooth and sparkling.

And no need to flex your detectivity. They boast of it! Heedlessly.

But if their Head (Chairman) is a proxy of the President in his self-appointing elections, there is no need for deeper checking – a natural All-Union Union, for you.

And here comes a sigh, on its own accord, from my broken heart full of grief – Oh, no! The State Committee for Emergency Situation was never down and out. All of them, our dear feathered friends are alive and kicking, both they and the rest of the gang: the Kremlin Dreamer, drunk on the blood of Romanov family’s children, and the Kremlin Ghoul, who drove the multimillion classes to their execution for being the elements incongruent with the plans of the socialist mass happiness, as foreseen in hypotheses of theorists of Marxism and practitioners from the murderous Communist party, and spangle-loving Leonid Ilych, and the following mummies, each and everyone of them embedded nicely in the Barbie Doll approved by the nomenclature Quality Check Department, licked up with tongues of silver by proxies from the Union of Writers ...

It’s only that now, for democracy’s sake, they use any vulgar taboo word they’re aware of, and by them a comment does not count for a comment without swearing in the style of pimply ignorant teenagers.

To be frank, all of us are scions of our teenage goonness, but for some reason my nostalgia cuts off at bullies of vocational schools.

Abruptly. Unaccountably.

And now, a bunch of grown-up men (by their looks) yet without a clue that the tabooed slang of Maht is the innermost essence of the language at large, which requires the most careful handling and correct presentation in order for all the facets of Maht’s associative connotations to do their job!

No off-hand handling here!

In order for a rude vulgarism to shine as it should, it need to be at times preceded by no less than a half-page of thick-set text.

Do you remember those mornings of Louis #14 entering his court chicken coop?

‘His Majesty... Maht!’ and the usher fucking the floor with the fucking pole in his hands...

And what’s more (here lies the subtlest trick of a master stroke) that the Maht-word itself should sound without nonessential pathos, sincerely and in a (one may even say) homy way, so that you immediately feel a compatriot in the speaker.

Take, for instance, so commonly employed, "f*cked up", made already too trite by its profuse usage, while more often than not "f*cked vertically" would suit the purpose much better!

And many other similar subtleties that will make you the soul of a party and always welcome guest...

But no! For the guardian machine-gunners at LitProm, all this is a sealed-and-too-deep-buried scroll.

Stupidly, basely, pick they up shoddy patterns from each other by the "copy-paste" method, not able to comprehend with their heads screwed up the wrong way that their ‘limp dicks hang like a drenched hearse wreath’, citing the classic.

Alas! we’re in a deep hole where the language pearls are dealt with by swine! Like those shibzdiks behind the row of sheet iron car sheds, lining to suck at the cigarette stolen by Vovchik from his elder sister, and droning monotonously:

'I say, pussy-ass, ain’t we, pussy-ass, cool, huh?'

'Yep! Pussy-ass! We, pussy-ass, are shocking!'

The pussy-assers memorized without grasping what’s that all about...

Poet Mayakovsky was who did truly face-off shocking at his concerts. He would hang the grand piano by its legs over the stage, and lay up a tea-table with a samovar beneath it, and, well—can you guess?—starts drinking tea together with his buddies at that table until the most smart from the amazed public stops gaping and tries at expressing their dissatisfaction, to which Vladimir Vladimirych (no! no! no! I’m not aiming at the Chairmanship, it just coincided!), without particularly bothering to look back over his shoulder into the hall and even almost without delving into what, specifically, the complaints were about, thundered the diagnosis from the samovar council: “You’re a fool yourself!”.

(Which is hard to deny remembering the ticket paid for.)

Eeeh! Folks knew how to showdown shockingly before the Bolshevik revolution...

No, I don’t argue, at LitProm there are those kissed by the divine Muse in their domes, who it is pleasant to discover, but the bulk of the rest drudge on creaking their uniform harness belts, scratching pens, indistinguishable from any other poop on their creative work floor, and when their superior, Chairman Deputy, deigns to poop a piece of his memoirs out, like how at the premiere of the horror film “Alien-12”, he shitted his jeans (sic! he swore by his mother’s grave!), then all the scribble-groupies lap it up delightedly, the seasoned connoisseurs and gourmets: “Ah! how, pussy-ass, poignant!”—“yes, yes! so, pussy-ass, refreshing!”—“Wow! pussy-ass! some fullest pussy-ass!”

Still would! the most burning memory from the young years of the guard, except for the bumblebee biting their pussy-ass, however, the Chairman Deputy has not yet shared that one...

In short, they kicked me out of that almshouse after 3 weeks, although I didn’t use a single vulgar word there.

Or maybe that's why?

And the presence of the electricity (yes, there happened blackouts, but not for long – a day or two, no more than four, and on such days by the candlelight I toasted to ArtsakhEnergo, which somehow excused interruptions in the supply of the electricity, besides, the crazy blizzard was not their responsibility), combined with the presence of my desktop PC, prompted me to recall the long-delayed The Rascally Romance, which I diligently set about.

Preface to the 2nd Edition of The Rascally Romance

“... A couple of years ago, some incomprehensible affliction beset me, several times a day I turned off completely, fainted without regard to place and time: in the kitchen, in the yard, on the steps of the stairs climbing up to the entrance door, then I slowly floated back out of blackout oblivion, left the recumbent position and tried to live on.

So I suffered for three-four days, and on September 1, as a law-abiding teacher, I made my way to the teacher's room at school in our village, but instead of “hello! congratulations,” I said: “Take me to the District Center Hospital or I’ll die.”

One and a half weeks under the IV drips in the Lachin Hospital raised me up and persuaded strongly that I was running risk of leaving the novel (the idea of which had been brewed up for more than a decade) unwritten; and it's a pity.

The situation brought about the first online publication of the work completed in a little over a year. Later, while working at translation of the stuff into English (it’s a sin to let such material be lost), I saw that some parts in the Russian version were written post-haste, barely indicating the details with a sloppy blueprint dashes, the consequence of dastardly hustle – not only to be late!

And so, full of shame and irritation at the hurriedly over-looked blunders, I had to sit down for the next (I swear – the last!) edition of The Rascally Romance.

As for the original plot and arrangement of components, there are no objections—you can’t twist cooler something bent so dashingly—so the work was mainly carried out about placing right words where they belong, in a word – editing the style.

It’s like going over a finished product with a piece of sandpaper (for those who understand what it’s about, and the rest are only able to “jingle their precious pendants of nano-pebbles” (J. Lennon from Liverpool) or simply “click-clack their fucking balls” (V. Kaverin from Konotop)).

Seems like that's that.

Bye!

2018-10-2"

- - -

The future clearly proved my perfidious perjured nature.

But then, who's never sinned?

* * *